The Ten Commandments of Con Men

The first time I wrote about her was in 2009. I met her in a bookstore and she was drawing and I was attracted to her. I asked her what she was drawing.

She told me her whole story. And then a week later I wrote about it. That same day I got my first death threat. “I could kill you for writing about her.”

I apologized to her. We met. I asked her out. She said no. “You’re too old for me.” Which I was.

I wrote about her again a few years later. Not because of her but because of who her boss was.

He was/is a famous artist. He paints beautiful images of semi-naked women in nature.

Only… she paints them. He takes photographs of the women, blows them up poster-size, and then she would paint over the posters with oils and the painter would sign his name.

Each painting went for tens of thousands of dollars. He would sell out.

“When collectors came to visit, we would clear out, he’d put on paint-smattered clothes and pretend to be at work.”

The idea: if someone paid $50,000 for a work of art there was basically zero chance they would scrape off the paint and reveal the poster underneath. So the forgery and fraud was never discovered.

Until I first wrote about her. And then someone who was already suspicious did scrape and discover the fraud.

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